Mark Manson
Author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and co-author of Will Smith's memoir
Where to hear and read about Mark Manson1 episode or test
Mark Manson is the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and co-author of Will Smith's memoir, who grew a blog from a handful of readers to millions. The habit most worth copying is writing the answer you would give a friend at a bar, word for word, in your own voice.
if the idea is not strong there's no amount of quality writing is going to save it
How to Become a Bestselling Author (Mark Manson Interview)
Mark Manson: the story and the lessons
1Mark Manson's path from outsider to writer
A closed family and a conservative town pushed Manson toward philosophy. His family did not share or process feelings, and the surrounding culture was very Christian. His parents acted one way at church and another at home.
Not fitting in made him curious about why people do what they do. He read Ayn Rand in high school, and Marilyn Manson led him to philosophy by telling disgruntled kids they did not have to believe what they were taught.
Manson read for years before he wanted to write. He became a reader in middle school and finished Stephen King's 1,100-page It in sixth grade. He did not want to be a writer until about 27 or 28.
He got bad grades in writing and could not spell or manage grammar. For fun he wrote three-page, bullet-point rebuttals on forums on Saturdays.
Manson started blogging to drive traffic to his internet businesses. It took about two years to see that the blog was the better career path than the businesses.
Marketing, sales and strategy never came naturally, while writing a post was the fun part. After he committed to being the best writer he could, his audience tripled within a few months.
Jazz school showed Manson his limits and trained his ear. He studied jazz performance and saw within a semester that he was not as good as the few who would make it. He left for something else.
He still judges a sentence by rhythm, melody and repetition, which is why he calls writing tuned for sound and feeling his strength.
Manson moved from dating advice to self-help because the problems were never about dating. Reader emails showed low self-esteem, no identity and no job, which texting tips could not fix. By 2012 he was writing self-help while still calling himself a dating coach, and a 2013 rebrand opened the floodgates to a new audience.
He had read self-help since his teens and found it impractical and almost narcissistic, so he wrote what he wished someone would say, in titles like "Stop trying to be happy" and "You are not special". He describes the career shifts as mostly opportunism explained afterward.
2How Manson grew his blog audience
Manson started with seven readers and one month of 63 page views. He says you do not know what you enjoy writing or what readers want until you have written about 100 posts.
At conferences from about 2011 to 2016 people mobbed him asking how to start a blog. He would find they had three posts and tell them to write 100 and come back.
Manson spotted the Facebook news feed opportunity by watching BuzzFeed and Upworthy. Facebook wanted to be the world's homepage, so its algorithm weighted publisher links heavily. The news feed launched in 2011, and his blog took off in 2012 and early 2013.
He saw this before most people did.
Manson treated every headline and image as sales copywriting. He had studied direct-sales copywriting in marketing work and put his effort into the title and the image under each link. From 2012 to early 2015 the blog grew from about 100,000 to about 2.5 million monthly readers.
Manson often picked the title first, then found research to justify it. Once he knew a killer title could carry a post, he started there and built the content to earn it.
He notes YouTubers now do the same, starting with title and thumbnail and then making the video.
Going viral did most of Manson's SEO work for him. He tried SEO directly and was bad at it. Viral posts brought backlinks, comments and mentions, and Google began counting those social signals.
He estimates 80 to 90 percent of his SEO success came this way.
3How The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck became a bestseller
Manson refused a boring default cover and pushed for something iconic. Harper sent a plain asterisk cover. He made three or four versions in Photoshop, and his agent, editor and team all picked the orange splat.
He found the splat on an airplane, and eight years later it is on everything he does. Orange and profanity in the title made a slightly odd book easy for the audience to understand.
The book became a hit slowly, with Audible leading. It debuted at number six on the New York Times list, then fell off for a few months. It hit number one on Audible first, and that pull carried over to hardcover.
It returned to the list around month four or five, then reached number one and stayed there for about a year. It was still on the list about three years later.
Manson chose the audiobook narrator by gut in five seconds. In 2015 authors rarely read their own audiobooks. He rejected every sample as cheesy and wanted a dry, deadpan voice like a tipsy guy at a bar. Roger Wayne came after two more rounds.
Fans later told him the narrator's back catalog was romance novels. He thinks not checking was better, because he only judged the voice.
4Manson's rules for writing in his own voice
Manson writes the answer he would give a friend at a bar. He imagines a friend has just asked him the question, then writes word for word what he would say out loud. When a chapter feels like work, he is trying to impress someone, so he deletes it and restarts as himself.
A top Amazon review compared him to a drunk guy lecturing you about your life at 2 am, and the Sunday Times called him the local drunk who spent too much time in the philosophy section. He takes both as accurate and says that is why people read him.
Manson says your real voice arrives only after an awkward phase. Every creative pursuit has an awkward teenage phase. Early on, being yourself feels contrived, so you try on other people's masks until they fall away.
He cites Miles Davis: it takes a long time to be able to play like yourself. You get ridiculed whichever way you go, so be ridiculed for who you are.
Manson tests a blog on friends and family first. If they will not read past one post, you are far from your competence or pretending to be someone else.
People who know you sense the mismatch, and they kind of have to care, so their lack of interest is a bad sign. His own early core group was roommates and a couple of buddies.
Manson deletes the first paragraph of most pieces. Around 2013 or 2014 a reader told him that cutting the first paragraph of his last four posts would improve all four. He checked and agreed.
He now asks of every article or newsletter whether the opening paragraph is even necessary. For long warm-up stories, he says to cut them and start at the climax.
Manson trades some precision for resonance and accepts the cost. His writing is built for emotional experience. When he tried to be a public intellectual he was too light for the nerds and too intellectual for readers who wanted cool stuff.
He says truth and resonance can contradict and that he would be a terrible journalist. In the Hiroo Onoda story he implied Onoda left Japan for good, though the truth was messier. It hit harder, even though readers wrote in to correct it.
5How Manson builds a book
Manson says the idea sets the ceiling for the writing. A strong idea is easy to write and a weak one gets harder, including any story used to support it. A bad idea can reach a mediocre passage but never a great one.
It took him a long time to learn that the section he worked hardest on is often the worst one, because the idea under it is weak.
Manson tests ideas outward in concentric circles. First he must be excited, then trusted people, then a few fans, then the audience. The trusted circle is a partner, best friend, a couple of employees, his agent and his editor.
Even his dad can be one of the extra opinions.
Manson expects every book outline to collapse around chapter three. Chapter one is exciting and chapter two holds together, but by chapter three the cracks show. Three or four months in, the old outline is in the garbage and he rewrites the early chapters, usually throwing out about half of the draft.
He calls it by far the least fun stage, says it has happened with every book, and has quit on a couple of books at this point.
Manson fixes stalled books by finding the real organizing idea. He says stuck books are almost always organizational. The idea you built the book around often turns out to be just one chapter.
Subtle Art first opened with what is now chapter four or five and fell apart about 50 pages in. Moving those chapters to the middle and back half made it work. The Bukowski story that opens the book sat in the middle of an early draft until he moved it to the front to set the tone.
Manson drafts in Scrivener and polishes in Word. Moving chapter 6 to chapter 2 takes minutes in Scrivener and about three hours of cutting and pasting in Word or Google Docs.
Scrivener's formatting tools are weaker, and the publishing industry runs on Word, so every book ends there.
6How Manson ghostwrote Will Smith's memoir
Smith could tell great stories but needed a writer to give them structure. Smith had tried writing it himself. He tells a hilarious five-minute story about his Fresh Prince audition but cannot zoom out to themes. After a long interview process, Manson spent three or four days with him on a movie set.
They bonded through humor, with Manson the cynic and Smith the Mr Everything is Awesome.
Manson pitched an outline overnight built on the emotions of each life stage. He stayed up until 2:30 a.m. to build it: a fearful childhood, an angry adolescence, early pride, later guilt, ending in love.
Smith jumped up at breakfast pumping and screaming "oh hell yeah", and Manson felt he had the job.
Manson researched each scene by asking what he would see standing there. He filmed the Philadelphia church where Smith stood beside his grandmother so he could write one paragraph about gospel music echoing off wooden beams. Smith drew a floor plan of his childhood home, down to the couch and kitchen table.
He also used the press archive, home movies, Jada, the kids, Smith's mom and a childhood friend who toured West Philly.
Manson insisted on long interview blocks. Interviews rarely get deep before hour two or three, and Smith gave 30 to 40 minutes at a time. Manson told a manager that anything under an hour was not worth his being there.
He ended up shadowing Smith for about two years, a week at a time, with daily FaceTime.
Manson and Smith split the drafts so each used his strength. They built the outline and research together, Manson wrote the first draft, Smith revised it in his own voice and added details, and Manson did a polish pass.
Smith spent three or four months on his revision during the pandemic. Manson's agent had warned that with most celebrity books you are lucky if they even read the draft.
Manson calls ghostwriting the purest and most enjoyable writing he has done. He curated the best stories and ideas without the self-doubt that comes with his own material, and went for enthusiasm and intensity to match Smith.
Smith exaggerates, and people around him dial it back three notches, so "a thousand people" was really about 80.
7How Manson chooses ideas and keeps them fresh
Manson balances audience interest, his own excitement and the brand. If he must sacrifice two circles for one, he writes what excites him. A couple of times a year he writes something nobody asked for.
His long pieces on heavy metal get crickets, but about 10 fans love them. He says creative people should let that out occasionally rather than let it build up.
Manson reads books, not the news, and reads outside his field. He reads fiction, economics and history, then asks how a dynamic that plays out across markets would play out inside one mind, such as a market where parts of your identity trade self-esteem.
He quotes Murakami: if you read what everybody else is reading you'll think what everybody else is thinking. Inversion is a common thread in his best-performing ideas.
Manson treats writer's block as self-imposed expectations. Fear of looking foolish, the need to make money or the push to grow an audience each shrink the space of acceptable ideas. Widening that boundary lets ideas flow again.
He suggests writing as if no one will ever read it. An idea that seems unrelated to your work can fit it a few hours later as a story or example.
Fame cost Manson the relatability that made his early writing work. He says success steals the feeling of hanging out that early writing had, and nobody wants to hear him complain about first class.
He laments that his personal life is no longer relatable, so he talks about it less. Mainstream fame now means being stopped politely about once a week.
8Manson's mistakes and the costs of being early
Manson underestimated how hard an audio-first book would be. For Love Is Not Enough he coached people for six months and recorded it. He overestimated how much the conversations could carry and had to write a lot over the top, so the project took far more work than planned.
He says he has underestimated every new medium, YouTube included. One hundred great ideas do not make a book unless they are shaped to flow.
Manson's habit of arriving early on platforms sometimes backfires. He gets into a topic or platform, wonders why others are not there, and three years later everyone is. It took him a long time to trust that conviction.
The cost: he bought a lot of crypto five years ago and joined new platforms that died.
How to Become a Bestselling Author (Mark Manson Interview)
Mark Manson explains how he built a huge audience by writing in his own spoken voice, treating titles as copywriting, and testing ideas before committing to a structure. The most useful habit is imagining a friend at a bar asking you a question and writing the answer word for word as you would say it.
A closed family and a conservative town pushed Manson toward philosophy. His family did not share or process feelings, and the surrounding culture was very Christian. His parents acted one way at church and another at home.
Not fitting in made him curious about why people do what they do. He read Ayn Rand in high school, and Marilyn Manson led him to philosophy by telling disgruntled kids they did not have to believe what they were taught.
Manson read for years before he wanted to write. He became a reader in middle school and finished Stephen King's 1,100-page It in sixth grade. He did not want to be a writer until about 27 or 28.
He got bad grades in writing and could not spell or manage grammar. For fun he wrote three-page, bullet-point rebuttals on forums on Saturdays.
Manson started blogging to drive traffic to his internet businesses. It took about two years to see that the blog was the better career path than the businesses.
Marketing, sales and strategy never came naturally, while writing a post was the fun part. After he committed to being the best writer he could, his audience tripled within a few months.
Jazz school showed Manson his limits and trained his ear. He studied jazz performance and saw within a semester that he was not as good as the few who would make it. He left for something else.
He still judges a sentence by rhythm, melody and repetition, which is why he calls writing tuned for sound and feeling his strength.
Manson moved from dating advice to self-help because the problems were never about dating. Reader emails showed low self-esteem, no identity and no job, which texting tips could not fix. By 2012 he was writing self-help while still calling himself a dating coach, and a 2013 rebrand opened the floodgates to a new audience.
He had read self-help since his teens and found it impractical and almost narcissistic, so he wrote what he wished someone would say, in titles like "Stop trying to be happy" and "You are not special". He describes the career shifts as mostly opportunism explained afterward.
Manson started with seven readers and one month of 63 page views. He says you do not know what you enjoy writing or what readers want until you have written about 100 posts.
At conferences from about 2011 to 2016 people mobbed him asking how to start a blog. He would find they had three posts and tell them to write 100 and come back.
Manson spotted the Facebook news feed opportunity by watching BuzzFeed and Upworthy. Facebook wanted to be the world's homepage, so its algorithm weighted publisher links heavily. The news feed launched in 2011, and his blog took off in 2012 and early 2013.
He saw this before most people did.
Manson treated every headline and image as sales copywriting. He had studied direct-sales copywriting in marketing work and put his effort into the title and the image under each link. From 2012 to early 2015 the blog grew from about 100,000 to about 2.5 million monthly readers.
Manson often picked the title first, then found research to justify it. Once he knew a killer title could carry a post, he started there and built the content to earn it.
He notes YouTubers now do the same, starting with title and thumbnail and then making the video.
Going viral did most of Manson's SEO work for him. He tried SEO directly and was bad at it. Viral posts brought backlinks, comments and mentions, and Google began counting those social signals.
He estimates 80 to 90 percent of his SEO success came this way.
Manson refused a boring default cover and pushed for something iconic. Harper sent a plain asterisk cover. He made three or four versions in Photoshop, and his agent, editor and team all picked the orange splat.
He found the splat on an airplane, and eight years later it is on everything he does. Orange and profanity in the title made a slightly odd book easy for the audience to understand.
The book became a hit slowly, with Audible leading. It debuted at number six on the New York Times list, then fell off for a few months. It hit number one on Audible first, and that pull carried over to hardcover.
It returned to the list around month four or five, then reached number one and stayed there for about a year. It was still on the list about three years later.
Manson chose the audiobook narrator by gut in five seconds. In 2015 authors rarely read their own audiobooks. He rejected every sample as cheesy and wanted a dry, deadpan voice like a tipsy guy at a bar. Roger Wayne came after two more rounds.
Fans later told him the narrator's back catalog was romance novels. He thinks not checking was better, because he only judged the voice.
Manson writes the answer he would give a friend at a bar. He imagines a friend has just asked him the question, then writes word for word what he would say out loud. When a chapter feels like work, he is trying to impress someone, so he deletes it and restarts as himself.
A top Amazon review compared him to a drunk guy lecturing you about your life at 2 am, and the Sunday Times called him the local drunk who spent too much time in the philosophy section. He takes both as accurate and says that is why people read him.
Manson says your real voice arrives only after an awkward phase. Every creative pursuit has an awkward teenage phase. Early on, being yourself feels contrived, so you try on other people's masks until they fall away.
He cites Miles Davis: it takes a long time to be able to play like yourself. You get ridiculed whichever way you go, so be ridiculed for who you are.
Manson tests a blog on friends and family first. If they will not read past one post, you are far from your competence or pretending to be someone else.
People who know you sense the mismatch, and they kind of have to care, so their lack of interest is a bad sign. His own early core group was roommates and a couple of buddies.
Manson deletes the first paragraph of most pieces. Around 2013 or 2014 a reader told him that cutting the first paragraph of his last four posts would improve all four. He checked and agreed.
He now asks of every article or newsletter whether the opening paragraph is even necessary. For long warm-up stories, he says to cut them and start at the climax.
Manson trades some precision for resonance and accepts the cost. His writing is built for emotional experience. When he tried to be a public intellectual he was too light for the nerds and too intellectual for readers who wanted cool stuff.
He says truth and resonance can contradict and that he would be a terrible journalist. In the Hiroo Onoda story he implied Onoda left Japan for good, though the truth was messier. It hit harder, even though readers wrote in to correct it.
Manson says the idea sets the ceiling for the writing. A strong idea is easy to write and a weak one gets harder, including any story used to support it. A bad idea can reach a mediocre passage but never a great one.
It took him a long time to learn that the section he worked hardest on is often the worst one, because the idea under it is weak.
Manson tests ideas outward in concentric circles. First he must be excited, then trusted people, then a few fans, then the audience. The trusted circle is a partner, best friend, a couple of employees, his agent and his editor.
Even his dad can be one of the extra opinions.
Manson expects every book outline to collapse around chapter three. Chapter one is exciting and chapter two holds together, but by chapter three the cracks show. Three or four months in, the old outline is in the garbage and he rewrites the early chapters, usually throwing out about half of the draft.
He calls it by far the least fun stage, says it has happened with every book, and has quit on a couple of books at this point.
Manson fixes stalled books by finding the real organizing idea. He says stuck books are almost always organizational. The idea you built the book around often turns out to be just one chapter.
Subtle Art first opened with what is now chapter four or five and fell apart about 50 pages in. Moving those chapters to the middle and back half made it work. The Bukowski story that opens the book sat in the middle of an early draft until he moved it to the front to set the tone.
Manson drafts in Scrivener and polishes in Word. Moving chapter 6 to chapter 2 takes minutes in Scrivener and about three hours of cutting and pasting in Word or Google Docs.
Scrivener's formatting tools are weaker, and the publishing industry runs on Word, so every book ends there.
Smith could tell great stories but needed a writer to give them structure. Smith had tried writing it himself. He tells a hilarious five-minute story about his Fresh Prince audition but cannot zoom out to themes. After a long interview process, Manson spent three or four days with him on a movie set.
They bonded through humor, with Manson the cynic and Smith the Mr Everything is Awesome.
Manson pitched an outline overnight built on the emotions of each life stage. He stayed up until 2:30 a.m. to build it: a fearful childhood, an angry adolescence, early pride, later guilt, ending in love.
Smith jumped up at breakfast pumping and screaming "oh hell yeah", and Manson felt he had the job.
Manson researched each scene by asking what he would see standing there. He filmed the Philadelphia church where Smith stood beside his grandmother so he could write one paragraph about gospel music echoing off wooden beams. Smith drew a floor plan of his childhood home, down to the couch and kitchen table.
He also used the press archive, home movies, Jada, the kids, Smith's mom and a childhood friend who toured West Philly.
Manson insisted on long interview blocks. Interviews rarely get deep before hour two or three, and Smith gave 30 to 40 minutes at a time. Manson told a manager that anything under an hour was not worth his being there.
He ended up shadowing Smith for about two years, a week at a time, with daily FaceTime.
Manson and Smith split the drafts so each used his strength. They built the outline and research together, Manson wrote the first draft, Smith revised it in his own voice and added details, and Manson did a polish pass.
Smith spent three or four months on his revision during the pandemic. Manson's agent had warned that with most celebrity books you are lucky if they even read the draft.
Manson calls ghostwriting the purest and most enjoyable writing he has done. He curated the best stories and ideas without the self-doubt that comes with his own material, and went for enthusiasm and intensity to match Smith.
Smith exaggerates, and people around him dial it back three notches, so "a thousand people" was really about 80.
Manson balances audience interest, his own excitement and the brand. If he must sacrifice two circles for one, he writes what excites him. A couple of times a year he writes something nobody asked for.
His long pieces on heavy metal get crickets, but about 10 fans love them. He says creative people should let that out occasionally rather than let it build up.
Manson reads books, not the news, and reads outside his field. He reads fiction, economics and history, then asks how a dynamic that plays out across markets would play out inside one mind, such as a market where parts of your identity trade self-esteem.
He quotes Murakami: if you read what everybody else is reading you'll think what everybody else is thinking. Inversion is a common thread in his best-performing ideas.
Manson treats writer's block as self-imposed expectations. Fear of looking foolish, the need to make money or the push to grow an audience each shrink the space of acceptable ideas. Widening that boundary lets ideas flow again.
He suggests writing as if no one will ever read it. An idea that seems unrelated to your work can fit it a few hours later as a story or example.
Fame cost Manson the relatability that made his early writing work. He says success steals the feeling of hanging out that early writing had, and nobody wants to hear him complain about first class.
He laments that his personal life is no longer relatable, so he talks about it less. Mainstream fame now means being stopped politely about once a week.
Manson underestimated how hard an audio-first book would be. For Love Is Not Enough he coached people for six months and recorded it. He overestimated how much the conversations could carry and had to write a lot over the top, so the project took far more work than planned.
He says he has underestimated every new medium, YouTube included. One hundred great ideas do not make a book unless they are shaped to flow.
Manson's habit of arriving early on platforms sometimes backfires. He gets into a topic or platform, wonders why others are not there, and three years later everyone is. It took him a long time to trust that conviction.
The cost: he bought a lot of crypto five years ago and joined new platforms that died.